Code search is a highly required technique for software development. In recent years, the rapid development of transformer-based language models has made it increasingly more popular to adapt a pre-trained language model to a code search task, where contrastive learning is typically adopted to semantically align user queries and codes in an embedding space. Considering that the same semantic meaning can be presented using diverse language styles in user queries and codes, the representation of queries and codes in an embedding space may thus be non-deterministic. To address the above-specified point, this paper proposes an uncertainty-aware contrastive learning approach for code search. Specifically, for both queries and codes, we design an uncertainty learning strategy to produce diverse embeddings by learning to transform the original inputs into Gaussian distributions and then taking a reparameterization trick. We also design a hard negative sampling strategy to construct query-code pairs for improving the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware contrastive learning. The experimental results indicate that our approach outperforms 10 baseline methods on a large code search dataset with six programming languages. The results also show that our strategies of uncertainty learning and hard negative sampling can really help enhance the representation of queries and codes leading to an improvement of the code search performance.

Textual Graphs (TGs) present a graph-based representation of textual data and find wide applications in real-world scenarios, such as citation networks, knowledge graphs, and social networks. While the traditional "pre-train, fine-tune" framework effectively addresses tasks requiring abundant labeled data, it falls short in scenarios with limited resource or zero-shot learning capabilities, particularly in low-resource textual graph node classification. Additionally, prevalent approaches that convert text nodes into shallow or manually engineered features fail to capture the rich semantic nuances within the text. The conventional methods often neglect the fusion of semantic and topological information, resulting in suboptimal model learning. To overcome these challenges, we proposed a novel method of low-resource textual graph node classification based on large language models, i.e., Textual graph learning with semantic and topological awareness (TGLsta), which comprehensively explores the semantic information, near neighborhood information, and the topology information in textual graphs, where these components are the most important information source contained in textual graphs. Graph prompt tuning for both zero- and few-shot textual graph node classification is further introduced.

Accurate automatic breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is essential for early breast cancer screening and diagnosis. However, it remains challenging owing to (1) breast lesions of various scale and shape, (2) ambiguous boundaries caused by speckle noise and artifacts, and (3) the scarcity of high-quality annotations. Most existing semi-supervised methods employ the mean-teacher architecture, which merely learns semantic information within a single image and heavily relies on the performance of the teacher model. Therefore, we present a novel cross-image semantic correlation semi-supervised framework, named CSC-PA, to improve the performance of BUS image segmentation. CSC-PA is trained based on a single network, which integrates a foreground prototype attention (FPA) and an edge prototype attention (EPA). Specifically, FPA transfers complementary foreground information for more stable and complete lesion segmentation. On the other hand, EPA enhances edge features of lesions by using edge prototype, where an adaptive edge container is proposed to store global edge features and generate the edge prototype. Additionally, we introduce a pixel affinity loss (PAL) to exploit previously ignored contextual correlation in supervision, which further improves performance on edges. Extensive experiments on two benchmark BUS datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods under different partition protocols. Codes are available at https://github.com/shdkdh/CSC-PA.

Recent advancements in test-time adaptation (TTA) offer promising solutions for mitigating performance degradation caused by distribution shifts. However, they may fall short in practical deployment of GNNs during test time, due to the significant reliance on impractical retraining or modifications to online GNN models. To address such challenges, in this work, we propose a novel method, i.e., Test-Time Graph REBirth, dubbed TT-GREB, to effectively generalize the well-trained GNN models to the test-time graphs under distribution shifts by directly manipulating the test graph data. Concretely, we develop an overall framework designed by two principles for obtaining newly reborn test graphs, corresponding to two sub-modules: (1) prototype extractor for re-extracting the environment-invariant features of the test-time graph; and (2) environment refiner for re-fining the environment-varying features to explore the potential shifts. Furthermore, we propose a dual test-time graph contrastive learning objective with an effective iterative optimization strategy to obtain optimal prototype components and environmental components of the test graph. Extensive experiments on real-world graphs under diverse test-time distribution shifts verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing its superior ability to manipulate test-time graphs for better GNN generalization ability.

Ultra-fine-grained visual classification (ultra-FGVC) targets at classifying sub-grained categories of fine-grained objects. This inevitably requires discriminative representation learning within a limited training set. Exploring intrinsic features from the object itself via contrastive learning has demonstrated great progress towards learning discriminative representation. Yet forcingly dividing highly similar categories at the representation level may over-guide the learned feature space, leading to overfitting in the ultra-FGVC tasks. To this end, this paper introduces CLA-Net, a novel contrastive Lie algebra learning framework to address this fundamental problem in ultra-FGVC. The core design is a self-supervised module that performs self-shuffling and masking and then distinguishes these altered images from other images at a second-order representation level. This drives the model to learn an optimized feature space that has a large inter-class distance while remaining tolerant to intra-class variations. By incorporating this self-supervised module, the network acquires more knowledge from the intrinsic structure of the input data, which improves the generalization ability without requiring extra manual annotations. CLA-Net demonstrates strong performance on eight publicly available datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in the ultra-FGVC task. The code is available at: https://github.com/zichengpan/CLA-NET.

Multi-image understanding is crucial in real-world applications such as social media analysis and news reporting. However, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating models' ability to integrate external knowledge and perform cross-image reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce MRBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess knowledge-based reasoning across 12 diverse domains, incorporating four types of image relations: visually similar, identical entities, attribute-associated, and independent images. Additionally, we propose Multimodal Adaptive Retrieval Reasoning (MARR), a novel framework that enables the analysis of relationships among multiple input images and adaptively determines when to terminate the retrieval process. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show a notable gap between model and human performance. The best-performing model, Gemini 2.0, reaches 56.86% accuracy, still 20.24% below humans. Proprietary models generally surpass open-source ones, particularly on visually similar and same-entity tasks, underscoring current limits in multi-image reasoning and retrieval and positioning MRBench as a key diagnostic tool. Our benchmark is available for further research and development in this field. https://github.com/Bruce-XJChen/MRBench.

Information Retrieval (IR) constitutes a vital facet of Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems, focusing on the exploration of pertinent information within extensive collections of passages, such as Wikipedia, to facilitate subsequent reader processing. Historically, IR relied on textual overlaps for relevant context retrieval, employing methods like BM25 and TF-IDF, which, however, lacked natural language understanding. The advent of deep learning ushered in a new era, leading to the introduction of Dense Passage Retrievers (DPR), shows superiority over traditional sparse retrievers. These dense retrievers leverage Pre-Trained Language Models (PLMs) to initialize context encoders, enabling the extraction of natural language representations. They utilize the distance between latent vectors of contexts as a metric for assessing similarity. However, DPR methods are heavily reliant on large volumes of meticulously labeled data, such as Natural Questions. The process of data labeling is both costly and time-intensive. In this article, we propose a novel data augmentation methodology Self Data Augmentation (SDA) that employs DPR models to automatically annotate unanswered questions. Specifically, we initiate the process by retrieving relevant pseudo passages for these unlabeled questions. We subsequently introduce three distinct passage selection methods to annotate these pseudo passages. Ultimately, we amalgamate the pseudo-labeled passages with the unanswered questions to create augmented data. Our experimental evaluations conducted on two extensive datasets (Natural Questions and TriviaQA), alongside a relatively small dataset (WebQuestions), utilizing three diverse base models, illustrate the significant enhancement achieved through the incorporation of freshly augmented data. Moreover, our proposed data augmentation method exhibits remarkable flexibility, which is readily adaptable to various dense retrievers. Additionally, we have conducted a comprehensive human study on the augmented data, which further supports our conclusions.

Recently, the cross-modal pretraining model has been employed to produce meaningful pseudo-labels to supervise the training of an image clustering model. However, numerous erroneous alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model could produce poor-quality pseudo labels and degrade clustering performance. To solve the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel Multi-level Cross-modal Alignment method to improve the alignments in a cross-modal pretraining model for downstream tasks, by building a smaller but better semantic space and aligning the images and texts in three levels, i.e., instance-level, prototype-level, and semantic-level. Theoretical results show that our proposed method converges, and suggests effective means to reduce the expected clustering risk of our method. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets clearly show the superiority of our new method.

Open-set graph learning is a practical task that aims to classify the known class nodes and to identify unknown class samples as unknowns. Conventional node classification methods usually perform unsatisfactorily in open-set scenarios due to the complex data they encounter, such as out-of-distribution (OOD) data and in-distribution (IND) noise. OOD data are samples that do not belong to any known classes. They are outliers if they occur in training (OOD noise), and open-set samples if they occur in testing. IND noise are training samples which are assigned incorrect labels. The existence of IND noise and OOD noise is prevalent, which usually cause the ambiguity problem, including the intra-class variety problem and the inter-class confusion problem. Thus, to explore robust open-set learning methods is necessary and difficult, and it becomes even more difficult for non-IID graph data. To this end, we propose a unified framework named ROG_PL to achieve robust open-set learning on complex noisy graph data, by introducing prototype learning. In specific, ROG_PL consists of two modules, i.e., denoising via label propagation and open-set prototype learning via regions. The first module corrects noisy labels through similarity-based label propagation and removes low-confidence samples, to solve the intra-class variety problem caused by noise. The second module learns open-set prototypes for each known class via non-overlapped regions and remains both interior and border prototypes to remedy the inter-class confusion problem. The two modules are iteratively updated under the constraints of classification loss and prototype diversity loss. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed ROG_PL is the first robust open-set node classification method for graph data with complex noise. Experimental evaluations of ROG_PL on several benchmark graph datasets demonstrate that it has good performance.

The surge in merchant fraud poses a significant threat to market order and consumer security. Effective security monitoring for merchants is crucial in safeguarding the digital life ecosystem and users' financial well-being. Detecting daily fraudulent payment transactions, a challenging task for current methods, requires efficient transformation of transactions into embeddings, especially in representing merchants based on their behavioral transactions. To address this, we propose the Grouping Sampling-based Sequence Generation (GSSG) method to generate meaningful sequences, enabling interactions among correlated transactions. We introduce Hierarchical Embedding Learning (HEL) and Hierarchical Masking pre-training (HMP) for the effective representation of hierarchical structures within flat transaction sequences. Pretrained on WeChat Pay data, our model, PTP, demonstrates superior performance in downstream fraud transaction detection, especially in few-shot learning scenarios, showcasing great potential in payment transaction scenarios.

We present a novel semi-supervised framework for breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation, which is a very challenging task owing to (1) large scale and shape variations of breast lesions and (2) extremely ambiguous boundaries caused by massive speckle noise and artifacts in BUS images. While existing models achieved certain progress in this task, we believe the main bottleneck nowadays for further improvement is that we still cannot deal with hard cases well. Our framework aims to break through this bottleneck, which includes two innovative components: an adaptive patch augmentation scheme and a hard-patch contrastive learning module. We first identify hard patches by computing the average entropy of each patch and then shield hard patches to prevent them from being cropped out while performing random patch cutmix. Such a scheme is able to prevent hard regions from being inadequately trained under strong augmentation. We further develop a new hard-patch contrastive learning algorithm to direct model attention to hard regions by applying extra contrast to pixels in hard patches, further improving segmentation performance on hard cases. We demonstrate the superior-ity of our framework to state-of-the-art approaches on two famous BUS datasets, achieving better performance under different labeling conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/jjjsyyy/PH-Net.

Unsupervised question answering is a promising yet challenging task, which alleviates the burden of building large-scale annotated data in a new domain. It motivates us to study the unsupervised multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to generate synthetic MCQA data barely based on contexts from the universal domain without relying on any form of manual annotation. Possible answers are extracted and used to produce related questions, then we leverage both named entities (NE) and knowledge graphs to discover plausible distractors to form complete synthetic samples. Experiments on multiple MCQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Image-text retrieval stands as a pivotal task within information retrieval, gaining increasing importance with the rapid advancements in Visual-Language Pretraining models. However, current benchmarks for evaluating these models face limitations, exemplified by instances such as BLIP2 achieving near-perfect performance on existing benchmarks. In response, this paper advocates for a more robust evaluation benchmark for image-text retrieval, one that embraces several essential characteristics. Firstly, a comprehensive benchmark should cover a diverse range of tasks in both perception and cognition-based retrieval. Recognizing this need, we introduce ReCoS, a novel benchmark specifically designed for cross-modal image-text retrieval in complex real-life scenarios. Unlike existing benchmarks, ReCoS encompasses 12 retrieval tasks, with a particular focus on three cognition-based tasks, providing a more holistic assessment of model capabilities. To ensure the novelty of the benchmark, we emphasize the use of original data sources, steering clear of reliance on existing publicly available datasets to minimize the risk of data leakage. Additionally, to strike a balance between the complexity of the real world and benchmark usability, ReCoS includes text descriptions that are neither overly detailed, making retrieval overly simplistic, nor under-detailed to the point where retrieval becomes impossible. Our evaluation results shed light on the challenges faced by existing methods, especially in cognition-based retrieval tasks within ReCoS. This underscores the necessity for innovative approaches in addressing the complexities of image-text retrieval in real-world scenarios. Our code and benchmark datasets are available for further research and development in this field https://github.com/Bruce-XJChen/ReCos

Open-set Classification (OSC) is a critical requirement for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world, which aims to classify samples from known classes and reject samples from out-of-distribution (OOD). Existing methods exploit the feature space of trained network and attempt at estimating the uncertainty in the predictions. However, softmax-based neural networks are found to be overly confident in their predictions even on data they have never seen before and the immense diversity of the OOD examples also makes such methods fragile. To this end, we follow the idea of estimating the underlying density of the training data to decide whether a given input is close to the in-distribution (IND) data and adopt Energy-based models (EBMs) as density estimators. A novel energy-based generative open-set node classification method, \textit{EGonc}, is proposed to achieve open-set graph learning. Specifically, we generate substitute unknowns to mimic the distribution of real open-set samples firstly, based on the information of graph structures. Then, an additional energy logit representing the virtual OOD class is learned from the residual of the feature against the principal space, and matched with the original logits by a constant scaling. This virtual logit serves as the indicator of OOD-ness. EGonc has nice theoretical properties that guarantee an overall distinguishable margin between the detection scores for IND and OOD samples. Comprehensive experimental evaluations of EGonc also demonstrate its superiority.

Image clustering is an important and open challenging task in computer vision. Although many methods have been proposed to solve the image clustering task, they only explore images and uncover clusters according to the image features, thus being unable to distinguish visually similar but semantically different images. In this paper, we propose to investigate the task of image clustering with the help of visual-language pre-training model. Different from the zero-shot setting, in which the class names are known, we only know the number of clusters in this setting. Therefore, how to map images to a proper semantic space and how to cluster images from both image and semantic spaces are two key problems. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel image clustering method guided by the visual-language pre-training model CLIP, named Semantic-Enhanced Image Clustering (SIC). In this new method, we propose a method to map the given images to a proper semantic space first and efficient methods to generate pseudo-labels according to the relationships between images and semantics. Finally, we propose to perform clustering with consistency learning in both image space and semantic space, in a self-supervised learning fashion. The theoretical result of convergence analysis shows that our proposed method can converge at a sublinear speed. Theoretical analysis of expectation risk also shows that we can reduce the expectation risk by improving neighborhood consistency, increasing prediction confidence, or reducing neighborhood imbalance. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets clearly show the superiority of our new method.

Qin Zhang, Shangsi Chen, Dongkuan Xu, Qingqing Cao, Xiaojun Chen, Trevor Cohn, Meng Fang. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Node classification is the task of predicting the labels of unlabeled nodes in a graph. State-of-the-art methods based on graph neural networks achieve excellent performance when all labels are available during training. But in real-life, models are of ten applied on data with new classes, which can lead to massive misclassification and thus significantly degrade performance. Hence, developing open-set classification methods is crucial to determine if a given sample belongs to a known class. Existing methods for open-set node classification generally use transductive learning with part or all of the features of real unseen class nodes to help with open-set classification. In this paper, we propose a novel generative open-set node classification method, i.e., G2Pxy, which follows a stricter inductive learning setting where no information about unknown classes is available during training and validation. Two kinds of proxy unknown nodes, inter-class unknown proxies and external unknown proxies are generated via mixup to efficiently anticipate the distribution of novel classes. Using the generated proxies, a closed-set classifier can be transformed into an open-set one, by augmenting it with an extra proxy classifier. Under the constraints of both cross entropy loss and complement entropy loss, G2Pxy achieves superior effectiveness for unknown class detection and known class classification, which is validated by experiments on bench mark graph datasets. Moreover, G2Pxy does not have specific requirement on the GNN architecture and shows good generalizations.

Micro-video classification plays a central role in online content recommendation platforms, such as Kwai and Tik-Tok. Existing works on video classification largely exploit the interactions between users and items as well as the item labels to provide quality recommendation services. However, scarce or even no labeled data of emerging videos is a great challenge for existing classification methods. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot micro-video classification model (NVIGPN) by exploiting the hidden topics behind items to guide the representation learning in user-item interactions. Specifically, we study this zero-shot classification in two stages: (1) exploiting a generalized semantic hidden topic descriptions for transferable knowledge learning, and (2) designing a graph-based learning model for guiding the minor seen class information to the unseen ones. Through mining the transferable knowledge between the hidden topics and the small number of the seen classes, NVIGPN can achieves state-of-the-art performances in predicting the unseen classes of micro-videos. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Domain generalization refers to the challenge of training a model from various source domains that can generalize well to unseen target domains. Contrastive learning is a promising solution that aims to learn domain-invariant representations by utilizing rich semantic relations among sample pairs from different domains. One simple approach is to bring positive sample pairs from different domains closer, while pushing negative pairs further apart. However, in this paper, we find that directly applying contrastive-based methods is not effective in domain generalization. To overcome this limitation, we propose to leverage a novel contrastive learning approach that promotes class-discriminative and class-balanced features from source domains. Essentially, clusters of sample representations from the same category are encouraged to cluster, while those from different categories are spread out, thus enhancing the model's generalization capability. Furthermore, most existing contrastive learning methods use batch normalization, which may prevent the model from learning domain-invariant features. Inspired by recent research on universal representations for neural networks, we propose a simple emulation of this mechanism by utilizing batch normalization layers to distinguish visual classes and formulating a way to combine them for domain generalization tasks. Our experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in classification accuracy over state-of-the-art techniques on popular domain generalization benchmarks, including Digits-DG, PACS, Office-Home and DomainNet.

Graph neural architecture search (NAS) has gained popularity in automatically designing powerful graph neural networks (GNNs) with relieving human efforts. However, existing graph NAS methods mainly work under the homophily assumption and overlook another important graph property, i.e., heterophily, which exists widely in various real-world applications. To date, automated heterophilic graph learning with NAS is still a research blank to be filled in. Due to the complexity and variety of heterophilic graphs, the critical challenge of heterophilic graph NAS mainly lies in developing the heterophily-specific search space and strategy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel automated graph neural network on heterophilic graphs, namely Auto-HeG, to automatically build heterophilic GNN models with expressive learning abilities. Specifically, Auto-HeG incorporates heterophily into all stages of automatic heterophilic graph learning, including search space design, supernet training, and architecture selection. Through the diverse message-passing scheme with joint micro-level and macro-level designs, we first build a comprehensive heterophilic GNN search space, enabling Auto-HeG to integrate complex and various heterophily of graphs. With a progressive supernet training strategy, we dynamically shrink the initial search space according to layer-wise variation of heterophily, resulting in a compact and efficient supernet. Taking a heterophily-aware distance criterion as the guidance, we conduct heterophilic architecture selection in the leave-one-out pattern, so that specialized and expressive heterophilic GNN architectures can be derived. Extensive experiments illustrate the superiority of Auto-HeG in developing excellent heterophilic GNNs to human-designed models and graph NAS models.

Deep unsupervised hashing has been appreciated in the regime of image retrieval. However, most prior arts failed to detect the semantic components and their relationships behind the images, which makes them lack discriminative power. To make up the defect, we propose a novel Deep Semantic Components Hashing (DSCH), which involves a common sense that an image normally contains a bunch of semantic components with homology and co-occurrence relationships. Based on this prior, DSCH regards the semantic components as latent variables under the Expectation-Maximization framework and designs a two-step iterative algorithm with the objective of maximum likelihood of training data. Firstly, DSCH constructs a semantic component structure by uncovering the fine-grained semantics components of images with a Gaussian Mixture Modal~(GMM), where an image is represented as a mixture of multiple components, and the semantics co-occurrence are exploited. Besides, coarse-grained semantics components, are discovered by considering the homology relationships between fine-grained components, and the hierarchy organization is then constructed. Secondly, DSCH makes the images close to their semantic component centers at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels, and also makes the images share similar semantic components close to each other. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical semantic components indeed facilitate the hashing model to achieve superior performance.

Structured sequences are a popular data representation, used to model complex data such as traffic networks. A key machine learning task for structured sequences is node classification, that is predicting the class labels of unlabeled nodes. Though many node classification models were proposed, they assume a closed world setting, that all class labels appear in the training data. But in the real-world, the presence of never-before-seen class labels in testing data can considerably degrade a classifier’s accuracy. A promising solution to this issue is to build classifiers for an open-world setting, where samples with unknown class labels are continuously observed such that training and testing data may have different class label spaces. Several approaches have been proposed for open-world learning problems in computer vision and natural language processing, but they cannot be applied directly to structured sequences due to the complexity of their non-Euclidean properties and their dynamic nature. This paper addresses this important research gap by proposing a novel Open-world Structured Sequence node Classification (OSSC) model, to learn from structured sequences in an open-world setting. OSSC captures the structural and temporal information via a GCN-based dynamic variational framework. A latent distribution sequence is learned for each node using both stochastic states and deterministic states, to capture the evolution of node attributes and topology, followed by a sampling process to generate node representations. An open-world classification loss is further adopted to ensure that node representations are sensitive to unknown classes. And a combination of Openmax and Softmax is utilized to recognize nodes from unknown classes and to classify others to one of the known classes. Experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed OSSC method is capable of learning accurate open-world node classifiers from structured sequence data.

Brain electroencephalography (EEG), the complex, weak, multivariate, nonlinear, and nonstationary time series, has been recently widely applied in neurocognitive disorder diagnoses and brain-machine interface developments. With its specific features, unlabeled EEG is not well addressed by conventional unsupervised time-series learning methods. In this article, we handle the problem of unlabeled EEG time-series clustering and propose a novel EEG clustering algorithm, that we call mwcEEGc. The idea is to map the EEG clustering to the maximum-weight clique (MWC) searching in an improved Fréchet similarity-weighted EEG graph. The mwcEEGc considers the weights of both vertices and edges in the constructed EEG graph and clusters EEG based on their similarity weights instead of calculating the cluster centroids. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to cluster unlabeled EEG trials using MWC searching. The mwcEEGc achieves high-quality clusters with respect to intracluster compactness as well as intercluster scatter. We demonstrate the superiority of mwcEEGc over ten state-of-the-art unsupervised learning/clustering approaches by conducting detailed experimentations with the standard clustering validity criteria on 14 real-world brain EEG datasets. We also present that mwcEEGc satisfies the theoretical properties of clustering, such as richness, consistency, and order independence.

Hashing technology has been widely used in image retrieval due to its computational and storage efficiency. Recently, deep unsupervised hashing methods have attracted increasing attention due to the high cost of human annotations in the real world and the superiority of deep learning technology. However, most deep unsupervised hashing methods usually pre-compute a similarity matrix to model the pairwise relationship in the pre-trained feature space. Then this similarity matrix would be used to guide hash learning, in which most of the data pairs are treated equivalently. The above process is confronted with the following defects:1) The pre-computed similarity matrix is inalterable and disconnected from the hash learning process, which cannot explore the underlying semantic information. 2) The informative data pairs may be buried by the large number of less-informative data pairs. To solve the aforementioned problems, we propose a Deep Self-Adaptive Hashing(DSAH) model to adaptively capture the semantic information with two special designs: Adaptive Neighbor Discovery(AND) and Pairwise Information Content(PIC). Firstly, we adopt the AND to initially construct a neighborhood-based similarity matrix, and then refine this initial similarity matrix with a novel update strategy to further investigate the semantic structure behind the learned representation. Secondly, we measure the priorities of data pairs with PIC and assign adaptive weights to them, which is relies on the assumption that more dissimilar data pairs contain more discriminative information for hash learning. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that the above two technologies facilitate the deep hashing model to achieve superior performance.

Identifying influencers on social media, such as Twitter, has played a central role in many applications, including online marketing and political campaigns. Compared with social media celebrities, domain-specific influencers are less expensive to hire and more engaged in spreading messages such as new treatment or timely prevention for HIV. However, most of the existing topic modeling based approaches fail to identify influencers who are dedicated to the rare yet important topics such as HIV and suicide. To alleviate this limitation, we investigate an on-Demand Influencer Discovery (DID) framework that is able to identify influencers on any subject depicted by a few user-specified keywords, regardless of its popularity on social media. The DID model employs an iterative learning process that integrates the language attention network as a subject filter and the influence convolution network built on user interactions. Comprehensive evaluations on Twitter datasets show that the DID model can reliably identify influencers even on rare subjects such as HIV and suicide, outperforming existing topic-specific influencer detection models.

Time series has been a popular research topic over the past decade. Salient subsequences of time series that can benefit the learning task, e.g., classification or clustering, are called shapelets. Shapelet-based time series learning extracts these types of salient subsequences with highly informative features from a time series. Most existing methods for shapelet discovery must scan a large pool of candidate subsequences, which is a time-consuming process. A recent work, [1] , uses regression learning to discover shapelets in a time series; however, it only considers learning shapelets from labeled time series data. This paper proposes an Unsupervised Salient Subsequence Learning (USSL) model that discovers shapelets without the effort of labeling. We developed this new learning function by integrating the strengths of shapelet learning, shapelet regularization, spectral analysis and pseudo-label to simultaneously and automatically learn shapelets to help clustering unlabeled time series better. The optimization model is iteratively solved via a coordinate descent algorithm. Experiments show that our USSL can learn meaningful shapelets, with promising results on real-world and synthetic data that surpass current state-of-the-art unsupervised time series learning methods.

Social recommendation explores social information to improve the quality of a recommender system. It can be further divided into explicit and implicit social network recommendation. The former assumes the existence of explicit social connections between users in addition to the rating data. The latter one assumes the availability of only the ratings but not the social connections between users since the explicit social information data may not necessarily be available and usually are binary decision values (e.g., whether two people are friends), while the strength of their relationships is missing. Most of the works in this field use only rating data to infer the latent social networks. They ignore the dynamic nature of users that the preferences of users drift over time distinctly. To this end, we propose a new Implicit Dynamic Social Recommendation (IDSR) model, which infers latent social network from cascade data. It can sufficiently mine the information contained in time by mining the cascade data and identify the dynamic changes in the users in time by using the latest updated social network to make recommendations. Experiments and comparisons on three real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions in both explicit and implicit scenarios.

Exploratory search is cumbersome with today's search engines, where a user aims to better understand complex concepts. Query expansions techniques have been widely used in exploratory search. However, query expansions often recommend queries that differ from the user's search intentions due to different contexts. Yet, many of users' needs could be addressed by asking people via popular Community Question Answering (CQA) services. In this paper, we investigate query expansion techniques for exploratory search using the resources of CQA to discover the user's search intentions. Specifically, we denote the explicit intuition as the subtopic that supports the user's exploratory task. We propose the method CqaQuExp to mine the subtopics, which mainly contains three subtask: Question retrieval, where we extract the questions and corresponding answers from CQA; subtopic mining, where we discover the subtopics based on the extracted information; Candidate concepts discovery, where we select the candidate concepts from the discovered subtopics for query expansion. Experimental results on real-world data from Yahoo! Answers demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

In this paper, we study a new problem of continuous learning from doubly-streaming data where both data volume and feature space increase over time. We refer to the doubly-streaming data as trapezoidal data streams and the corresponding learning problem as online learning from trapezoidal data streams. The problem is challenging because both data volume and data dimension increase over time, and existing online learning[1],[2], online feature selection[3], and streaming feature selection algorithms[4],[5]are inapplicable. We propose a new Online Learning with Streaming Features algorithm (OL$_{SF}$for short) and its two variants, which combine online learning[1],[2]and streaming feature selection[4],[5]to enable learning from trapezoidal data streams with infinite training instances and features. When a new training instance carrying new features arrives, a classifier updates the existing features by following the passive-aggressive update rule[2]and updates the new features by following the structural risk minimization principle. Feature sparsity is then introduced by using the projected truncation technique. We derive performance bounds of the OL$_{SF}$algorithm and its variants. We also conduct experiments on real-world data sets to show the performance of the proposed algorithms.

We study a new problem of learning from doubly-streaming data where both data volume and feature space increase over time. We refer to the problem as mining trapezoidal data streams. The problem is challenging because both data volume and feature space are increasing, to which existing online learning, online feature selection and streaming feature selection algorithms are inapplicable. We propose a new Sparse Trapezoidal Streaming Data mining algorithm (STSD) and its two variants which combine online learning and online feature selection to enable learning trapezoidal data streams with infinite training instances and features. Specifically, when new training instances carrying new features arrive, the classifier updates the existing features by following the passive-aggressive update rule used in online learning and updates the new features with the structural risk minimization principle. Feature sparsity is also introduced using the projected truncation techniques. Extensive experiments on the demonstrated UCI data sets show the performance of the proposed algorithms.